There came a day when Betty returned to take up her residence at The Priory. Since her father’s death she had been travelling. At first she and Anthony had corresponded regularly. They had discussed religion, politics, the science of things in general; he telling her of changes and happenings at home, and she telling him of her discoveries abroad. She wanted to see everything there was to be seen for herself, and then seek to make use of her knowledge; she would, of course, write a book. But after his eldest son’s death, which had happened when the child was about eight years old, Anthony for a time had not cared to write. Added to which there were long periods during which Betty had disappeared into ways untrodden of the postman. Letters had passed between them at ever-lengthening intervals, dealing so far as Anthony was concerned chiefly with business matters. It seemed idle writing about himself: his monotonous prosperity and unclouded domestic happiness. There were times when he would have been glad of a friend to whom he could have trusted secrets, but the thread had been broken. Conscious of strange differences in himself, he could not be sure that Betty likewise had not altered. Her letters remained friendly, often affectionate, but he no longer felt he knew her. Indeed there came to him the doubt that he ever had.
It was on a winter’s afternoon that Anthony, leaving his office, walked across to The Priory to see her. She had been back about a week, but Anthony had been away up north on business. She had received him in the little room above the hall that had always been her particular sanctum. Mr. Mowbray, when he had let the house furnished to his cousin, had stipulated that this one room should remain locked. Nothing in it had been altered. A wood fire was burning in the grate. Betty was standing in the centre of the room. She came forward to meet him with both hands:
“It’s good to see you again,” she said. “But what have you done to your hair, lad?” She touched it lightly with her fingers. She pushed him into the easy chair beside the blazing fire and remained herself standing.
He laughed. “Oh, we grow grey early in Millsborough,” he said.
He was looking up at her puzzled. “I’ve got it,” he said suddenly.
“Got what?” she laughed.
“The difference in you,” he answered. “You were the elder of us when I saw you last, and now you are the younger. I don’t mean merely in appearance.”
“It’s a shame,” she answered gravely. “You’ve been making money for me to spend. It’s that has made you old. They’re all so old, the moneymakers. I’ve met so many of them. Haven’t you made enough?”
“Oh, it isn’t that,” he answered. “It gets to be a habit. I shouldn’t know what else to do with myself now.”
She made him talk about himself. It was difficult at first, there seemed so little to tell. Jim was at Rugby and was going into the Guards. His uncle, Sir James, had married, and had three children, a boy and two girls. But the boy had been thrown from his pony while learning to ride and was a cripple. So it was up to young Strong’nth’arm to take over the Coomber tradition. As he would have plenty of money all would be easy. His uncle was still in India, but was coming back in the spring. He had been appointed to Aldershot.
Norah was at Cheltenham. The Coomber girls had always gone to Cheltenham. She had ideas of her own and was anxious herself to cut school life short and finish her education abroad in Vienna. One of the disadvantages of being rich was that it separated you from your children. But for that the boy could have gone to his old friend Tetteridge. So far as education was concerned, he would have done better. The girl could have gone to Miss Landripp’s at Bruton Square. They would have been all together and it would have been jolly.
Eleanor was wonderful. Betty would find her looking hardly a day older than when she had last seen her.
Betty laughed. “Good for you, lad,” she said. “It means you are still seeing her through lover’s eyes. It’s seventeen years ago, the date you are speaking of.”
Anthony could hardly believe it at first, but had to yield to facts. He still maintained that Eleanor was marvellous. Most women in her position would have clamoured for fashion and society—would have filled The Abbey with her swell friends and acquaintances, among whom Anthony would always have felt himself an outsider—would have insisted on a town house and a London season, Homburg and the Riviera—all that sort of thing: leaving Anthony to grind away at the money mill in Millsborough. That was what his mother had always feared. His mother had changed her opinion about Eleanor long ago. She had come to love her. Of course, when Norah came home there would have to be changes. But by that time it would all fit in. He would be done with money-making. He had discovered—or, rather, Eleanor had discovered it for him—that he was a good speaker. She had had to bully him, at first, into making the attempt; and the result had surprised even her. He might go into Parliament. Not with any idea of a political career, but to advocate reforms that he had in his mind. Parliament gave one a platform. One spoke to the whole country.
Tea had been brought. They were sitting opposite to one another at a small table near the fire.
“It reminds one of old times,” said Betty. “Do you remember our long walks and talks together up on the moor, we three. We had to shout to drown the wind.”
He did not answer immediately. He was looking at a reflection of himself in a small Venetian mirror on the opposite wall. It came back to him what old Mr. Mowbray had once said to him, as to his growing likeness to Ted. There was a suggestion, he could see it himself, especially about the eyes.
“Yes,” he answered. “I remember. Ted was the dreamer. He dreamed of a new world. You were for the practical. You wanted improvements made in the old.”
“Yes,” she answered. “I thought it could be done.”
He shook his head.
“You were wrong,” he said. “We were the dreamers. It was Ted had all the common sense.”
“Oh, yes, I go on,” he said in answer to her look. “What else is to be done. There used to be hope in the world. Now one has to pretend to hope. I hoped model dwellings were going to do away with the slums. There are miles more slums in Millsborough today than there were ten years ago; and myself, if I had to choose now I’d prefer the slums. I’d feel less like being in prison. But we did all we could. We put them in baths. It was a new idea in Millsborough. The local Press was shocked. ‘Pampering the Proletariat,’ was one of their headlines. They could have saved their ink. Our bath was used to keep the coals in. If they didn’t do that, they emptied their slops into it. It saved them the trouble of walking to the sink. We gave them all the latest sanitary improvements, and they block the drains by turning the places into dustbins. And those that don’t, throw their muck out the window. They don’t want cleanliness and decency. They were born and bred in mud and the dirt sticks to them; and they bring up their children not to mind it. And so it will go on. Of course, there are the few. You will find a few neat homes in the filthiest of streets. But they are lost among the mass, just as they were before. It has made no permanent difference. Millsborough is blacker, fouler, viler than it was when we started in to clean it. Garden suburbs. We began one of those five years ago on the slopes above Leeford, and already it has its Alsatia where its disreputables gather together for mutual aid and comfort. What is it all, but clearing a small space and planting a garden in the middle of a jungle. Sooner or later the jungle closes in again. Every wind blows in seeds.
“This profit-sharing. I can see the end of that. They quarrel among themselves over the sharing. Who shall have the most. Who shall be forced to accept least. And the strong gather together: it is for them to dictate the division; and the weaker snarl and curse, but have to yield. And brother is against brother, and father is against son. And so the old game of greed and grab begins anew. Co-operative shops. And the staff is for ever insisting on the prices being raised to their own kith and kin, so that their wages may be increased out of the profits. And when I expostulate they talk to me about my own companies and the fine dividends we earn by charging high prices to our neighbours.” He laughed.
“You remember Sheepskin,” he went on, “the old vicar? The Reverend Horace Pendergast has got the job now. He’s a cousin of Eleanor’s—rattling good preacher. We’re hoping to make him a bishop. I went to see the old man once, when I was a youngster, to arrange about my uncle’s funeral, and he threw me in a sermon. I don’t know why—I wasn’t worrying much about religion in those days—but I can still see his round, pink, puzzled face and his little fat hands that trembled as he talked. It was near Christmas time—Christ’s birthday; and all that he could think about, he told me, were the Christmas bills and how to meet them. It wasn’t his fault. How can a respectable married man be a Christian? ‘How can I preach Christ?’—there were tears in his eyes. ‘Christ the outcast, the beggar, the servant of the poor, the bearer of the Cross.’ That’s what he had started out to preach. The people would only have laughed at him. He lives in a big house, they would have said, and keeps four servants and a gig. His sons go to college, and his wife and daughters wear rich garments. ‘Struggle enough I find it, Strong’nth’arm,’ he confessed to me. ‘But I ought not to be struggling to do it. I ought to be down among the people, preaching Christ, not only with my lips but with my life.’ It isn’t talkers for God, it is fighters for God that are wanted. Men who are not afraid of the world!”
The daylight had faded. Betty had pushed the table into a corner. They sat beside the blazing logs.
“Some years ago,” said Betty, “I travelled from San Francisco to Hong Kong in company with a Chinese gentleman. It was during the off-season, and half a dozen of us had the saloon to ourselves. There were two commercial travellers and a young missionary and his wife. By process of natural selection—at least so I like to believe—Mr. Cheng and myself chummed on. He was one of the most interesting men I have met, and I think he liked talking to me. I remember one brilliantly clear night we were alone together on the deck. I was leaning back in my chair looking up at the Southern Cross. Suddenly I heard him say that the great stumbling block in the way of man’s progress was God. Coming from anybody else the remark would have irritated me; but I knew he wasn’t trying to be clever; and as he went on to explain himself I found myself in agreement with him. Man’s idea of God is of some all-powerful Being who is going to do everything for him. Man has no need to exert himself; God, moving in mysterious ways, is labouring to make the world a paradise where man may dwell in peace and happiness. All man has to do is to trust in God and practise patience. Man if he took the task in hand for himself could turn this world into a paradise tomorrow without waiting for God. But it would mean man giving up his greeds and passions. It is easier to watch and pray. God has promised man the millenium, in the dim and distant future. Men by agreeing together could have the millenium ready in time for their own children. When man at last grasps the fact that there is no God—no God, that is, in the sense that he imagines—that whatever is going to be done for him has got to be done by himself, there will be born in man the will to accomplish his own salvation. It is this idea of man as the mere creature—the mere puppet of God—powerless to save himself, helpless to avert his own fate, that through the ages has paralysed man’s spiritual energies.
“God is within us. We are God. Man’s free will is boundless. His future is in his own hands. Man has only to control his evil instincts and heaven is here; Man can conquer himself. Of his own will, he does so every day. For the purposes of business, of pleasure, of social intercourse, he puts a curb upon his lusts and passions. It is only the savage, the criminal that lets them master him. Man is capable of putting greed and selfishness out of his life. History, a record of man’s sin and folly, is also a record of man’s power to overcome within himself the obstacles that stand in the way of his own progress.
“Garibaldi called upon his volunteers to disregard all worldly allurements, to embrace suffering, wounds and death for the cause of Italian unity. And the young men flocked to his banners. Let the young men once grasp that not God but they themselves can win for all mankind freedom and joy, and an ever-increasing number of them will be willing to make the necessary sacrifice.
“One man showed them the way. There have, at various times, been born exceptional men through whom the spirit we call God has been able to manifest itself, to speak aloud to men. Of all these, your Christ was perhaps more than any of the others imbued with this spirit of God. In Christ’s voice we recognize the voice of God. It is the voice we hear within us, speaking to each of us individually. Christ’s one commandment: ‘Love one another,’ is the commandment that God has been whispering to us from the beginning of creation. Out of that Commandment life sprang. Through that commandment alone can life be made perfect. Love one another. It would solve every problem that has plagued mankind since the dawn of the Eocene epoch. It would recall man’s energies from the barren fields of strife to mutual labour for the husbandry of all the earth. In the words of your prophet: ‘The Wilderness be made glad, the desert rejoice and blossom as the rose.’ Why has man persisted in turning a deaf ear to this one supreme commandment? Why does man persistently refuse to follow the one guide who would lead him out of all his sorrows? To love is as easy as to hate. Why does he set himself deliberately to cultivate the one and not the other? There is no more reason for a French peasant hating a German farm labourer, for a white man hating a brown man, for a Protestant hating a Catholic, than for loving him. But our hate we take pains to nourish, it is a part of our education. We teach it to our children. At the altar of hate man is willing to make sacrifice; he will give to his last penny. On the altar of hate the mother will consent to the slaying of her own first-born. All things that are good come to man through love. No man denies this. No man but seeks, within the circle of his own home, to surround himself with love. Life without love is every man’s fear. To gain and keep love man sacrifices his own ease and comfort. To love is sweeter than to hate. Man watches himself, lest by sloth or indifference he should let love die; plans and labours to strengthen and increase love. If he would, he could love all men. If man took the same pains to cultivate his will to love that he takes to cultivate his will to hate, he could change the world.
“Man excuses himself for disregarding Christ’s express commandment by telling himself that the salvation of the world is God’s affair, not his. God’s love will make for man’s benefit a new heaven and a new earth. There is no need for man to bestir himself. While man pursues his greeds and hatreds God is busy preparing the miracle. One day, man is to wake up and find, to his joy, that he loves his fellow man; and the tears of the world will be wiped away. It is not God, it is man that must accomplish the miracle. It is by man’s own endeavour that he will be saved; by cleansing himself of hate, by setting himself in all seriousness to this great business of loving. Until he obeys Christ’s commandment he shall not enter the promised land.
“I have put it more or less into my own words,” she explained, “but I have given you the sense of it. He thought the time would come—perhaps soon—when the thinkers of the world would agree that civilization had been progressing upon a wrong line—that if destruction was to be avoided, man must retrace his steps. He thought that, apart from all else, the mere instinct of self-preservation would compel the race to turn aside from the pursuit of material welfare to the more important work of its spiritual development. He did not expect any conscious or concerted movement. Rather he believed that men and women in increasing numbers would withdraw themselves from the world, that they might live lives in conformity with God’s laws. He was a curious mixture of the religious and the scientific. He often employed the word God, but could not explain what he meant beyond that he ‘felt’ him. He held that the only altar at which a reasonable man could worship was the altar erected by the Greeks: ‘To the Unknown God.’ Christ he regarded as a Promethean figure who had received the fire from heaven and brought it down to men. That fire would never be extinguished. The spirit of Christ still moved about the world. It was the life force behind what little love still glowed and flickered among men. One day the smouldering embers would burst into flame.”
Betty put in two or three years at The Priory on and off, occupying herself chiefly with writing. But the wanderlust had got into her blood, and her book finished she grew restless.
One day Anthony and Eleanor had dined with her at The Priory. Eleanor had run away immediately after dinner to attend a committee meeting of the Children’s Holiday Society of which she was the president. Betty, she was sure, sympathized sufficiently with the movement to forgive her. She would be back soon after nine. Betty and Anthony took their coffee in the library.
“I wanted you both to come tonight,” she explained. “I’ve got into a habit of acting suddenly when an impulse seizes me. I may wake up any morning and feel I’ve got to go.”
“Whither?” he asked.
“How much money can I put my hands on within the next few months?” she asked.
She had warned him that she might be talking business. He mentioned a pretty considerable sum.
“All earned by the sweat of other people’s brows,” she commented with a smile.
“You give away a pretty good deal of it,” he reminded her consolingly.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I am very good. I take from them with one hand and give them back thirty per cent. of it with the other; that’s what our charity means. And it doesn’t really help, that’s the irritating part of it. It’s just the pouring out of a libation to the God-of-Things-as-they-are. ‘The poor always ye have with you.’”
“I sometimes think,” he said, “that Christ, when he told the young man to sell all he had and give it to the poor, was thinking rather of the young man than of the poor. It would have done them but such fleeting good. But to the young man it meant the difference between slavery and freedom. To be quit of it all. His horses and his chariots. His fine houses and his countless herds. His army of cringing servants. His horde of fawning clients. How could he win life, bound hand and foot to earth? Not even his soul was his own. It belonged to his great possessions.”
She was going into central Russia. She had passed through there some years ago and had happened upon one of its ever recurring famines. There was talk of another in the coming winter.
“The granary of Europe,” she continued. “I believe we import one-third of our grain from Russia. And every year the peasants die there of starvation by the thousands. That year I was there they reckoned a hundred thousand perished in one valley. They were eating the corpses of the children. And on my way to St. Petersburg I passed stations where the corn was rotting by the roadside. The price had fallen and it wasn’t worth transporting. The devil must get some fun looking down upon the world.”
He had been standing by the window with his hands in his pockets. It was still twilight. He swung round suddenly.
“I believe in the Devil,” he said. “I don’t mean the devil that we sing about—the discontented angel that God has let out at the end of a chain, that is finally to be destroyed when he has served God’s purpose. But the eternal spirit of evil that is a part of all things—that brooded over chaos before God came. He also must be our father. Hate, cruelty, lust, greed: how else were we born with them? Would they have come to us from God. Evil also claims us for his children—is fighting for possession of us, is calling to us to labour with him, to turn the world into hell. Hate one another. Do ill to one another. That is his commandment. Which does the world obey: God or the Devil? Does hate or love rule the world? Whom does the world honour? The greedy man, the selfish man, the man who ‘gets on’ by trampling on his fellows. Who are the world’s leaders? The makers of war, the preachers of hate. Who dares to follow Christ—to fight for God. How many? That’s the trouble of it. ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross.’ Poverty, self-denial, contempt, loneliness. We are afraid.”
He took a cigar from his case.
“It could be done,” he said. “That’s the tragedy of it. The victory won for God: if only a few of us had the courage. There are thousands of men and women in this England of ours alone who believe—who are convinced that the only hope of the world lies in our following the teaching of Christ. If these thousands of men and women were to say, each to himself, ‘I will no longer sin against the light that is within me. Whatever others may do—whatever the difficulties, the privations to myself may be, I will lead Christ’s life, I will obey his commandments.’ If here in Millsborough there were, say, only a handful of men and women known to be trying to lead Christ’s life, some of them rich men who had given up their possessions, feeling that so long as there is poverty in the world no man who loves his neighbour as himself can afford to be rich. Others, poor men and women content to remain poor, knowing that to gain riches one must serve Mammon and not God. A handful of men and women, scattered, silent, putting themselves forward only when some work for Christ was to be done. A handful of men and women labouring in quietness and in confidence to prepare the way for God: teaching their children new desires, new ambitions.
“Some would fail. But others would succeed. More would follow. It needs only a few to set the example. It would appeal to all generous men and women, to the young. Fighting for God. Fighting with God to save the world. Not to save oneself—not to get one’s own sweet self into heaven. That is the mistake that has been made: Appealing to the self that is in man, instead of to the Christ that is in man. ‘Believe and thou shalt be saved.’ It is an appeal to man’s greed, to his self-interest. It is heroes God wants, not mercenaries. Never mind yourself. Forget the wages. Help God to save the world. This little land of England, this poor, sad, grimy town of Millsborough, where each man hates his neighbour and the children play with dirt. Help God to make it clean and sweet. Help God to wipe away the tears of the world. Help God to save all men.
“We talk about the Spirits of Good and Evil, as if Evil were of its own nature subordinate to the Good—as if God’s victory were certain; a mere matter of time. How do we know? Evil was the first-born. All things that do not fight against it revert to it. How do we know it will not triumph in the end. God is not winning. God is being driven back. Man will not help. Once His followers were willing to suffer—to die for Him. Today we are afraid of a little ridicule—of a few privations. We think it can be done by preaching—by the giving of alms. There is but one way to fight for God: the way of Christ. Let the young man deny himself, take up his cross.”
There had followed a silence. How long it lasted neither could have told. The door opened and Eleanor entered.
She was full of her meeting. The committee had settled to send two hundred children for a fortnight to the seaside. She had let Anthony in for a hundred guineas. She laughed.
Betty explained that they might not be meeting again for some time. She was off to Russia. Eleanor was curious and Betty explained her plans.
Eleanor was seated on the arm of Anthony’s chair. She had noticed he was not smoking, and had lighted his cigar for him.
“It was poor mother’s sorrow,” she said. “‘I have never done anything,’ she confided to me once towards the end. I have given away a little money, but it was never mine to give. It never cost me anything. I want to give myself. It is the only gift that heals.”
Eleanor jumped down from her perch, and taking Betty’s face in her hands kissed her.
“How fine of you,” she said. “I rather envy you.”